Rob Hart’s not really intogimmicky beers. “Old Badger’sArse and that sort of thing?”he half asks and half laments,shaking his head. The credoof his Harts Family Brewers is to producegood beer, present it well and turn aprofit, without being married to a style, whether it’s old-fashioned chestnut bitters aimed at 60-somethings in the golf club or Belgian-style saisons to be sipped by hip young readers of The Chap in Shoreditch craft beer bars.

If you take a stroll down the wine aisles of a British supermarket these days, you’re bound to be struck by the diverse origins of the offering. It’s a veritable United Nations out there, with representatives from Australia, Chile, Spain, the US, Italy and South Africa jostling for shelf space with Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and Uruguay. Twenty years ago, the picture would have been different. Those shelves would have held a far scantier range of wines, and would almost certainly have been dominated by one country: France.

The wine trade loves Germany. In fact, it’s quite possible that anyone who has tasted even a smallish range of what the country has to offer loves its wines – they’re great quality, they cover pretty much every price point and they come in all shapes and sizes.

According to this year’s Good Beer Guide there are 1,147 breweries in the UK, with almost 200 opening in the past year, taking levels to a 70-year high. Established national and local brewers have been joined by exciting start-ups that have helped change the taste, quality and style of the beers we drink. But which one’s best? Only one way to find out ... with the latest in our Hot List poll of leading retailers and opinion-formers in the field.

The snacks market has gone mad for sharing sizes over the past few years, but as successive duty hikes have combined with economic and ecological factors to drive prices up, wines and spirits have begun to embrace individual serves.

Fears of a poor 2013 harvest in Spain have not materialised and the country looks set to remain the European favourite for wines at what retailers and producers are euphemistically calling “key price points”.

For the first time in a decade the UK beer market has shown two consecutive quarters of growth – led by retailers who champion premium bottled ale. The British Beer & Pub Association produces a quarterly beer barometer survey and it shows the total beer market grew 5.2% in the third quarter of 2013, its best performance this century.

A piledriver is a wrestling manoeuvre that sees a spandex-clad behemoth pick up his opponent, turn him upside down and slam his head into the ground. It is favoured by a wrestler called The Undertaker, and it always results in a knockout.

With prices under pressure from duty, short harvests and an exodus of growers struggling to make money from grapes, French wine suppliers face a balancing act. On the one hand it is a struggle to maintain value for money at entry level – but on the other, many are benefiting from consumers trading up.

Sales have dropped sharply, but retailers love Portugal, saying it’s “in a good place”. On average its wines are cheaper than many of its European competitors – but the complexity of its regions and grapes can put off the uninitiated.

More than 20 million UK viewers regularly tuned into the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, suffering the heartbreak of England’s crushing defeat by Germany and enjoying the drama of Spain’s extra-time win in the final.

This village off-licence and deli in a Victorian former schoolhouse has become a destination shop, thanks to its real ale and cider range, including a rolling choice on draught. Bottled beers are sourced from local microbreweries and craft brewers around the country and further afield, while the bottled cider range focuses on premium, niche and boutique products.

The ritual of celebrating Christmas with fizz has become as common as leaving a glass of sherry out for Santa. Yet, like cheap ice-cream deals when temperatures rise, the prices plummet just at the time people are most likely to buy Champagne.

We would like to apologise to any of our readers who are cricket fans for mentioning the “A” word at all. Not only did England hand the Ashes to the Aussies on a plate, but we were probably drinking their wines while we did it. Well, not the cricket team as such — but the rest of us.

If you heard there was a wine-producing country growing at 30% in the off-trade, you’d be running for the fireworks, wouldn’t you? You’d at least be cracking open a bottle of something special to celebrate.

Vodka’s inherent neutrality of flavour makes it a fiendishly difficult drinks category for brands to stand out in. Not too long ago the battle lines were drawn around numerical distinctions in distilling and filtering, but — perhaps realising the limitations of this strategy — producers are testing the boundaries of packaging, incorporating subtle shifts in ingredients, sharpening up back stories and highlighting meaningful aspects of provenance to inject the category with a new level of excitement.

Vino is a chain of four independent off-licences that rose from the ashes when Wine Rack went into administration in 2009. Three stores opened in 2010 and a fourth in 2011, with the aim of taking the best parts of the old Wine Rack business to create a place where customers feel comfortable — a shop environment that is easy to navigate, with well-trained, accessible staff.

"Wine has been and will continue to be one of our hero categories. I can’t dispute its growth and it shows no real sign of letting up,” says Simon Cairns, wine trading manager at the Co- operative Group.

Almost two years after adding the Nicolas stores in London to the Spirited Wines chain he set up in 2010, Benoit Thouvenin has a leaner estate but confidence in the future. He says business is much better than it was 18 months ago – but that has come at a cost. Rising rents and challenging trading have forced him to close 14 stores, leaving him with just five of the shops outside London that he began trading with.

While spirits sales grow, cream liqueurs are in the doldrums. This year’s First Drinks Market Report put off-trade sales value in the 12 months to April 27 level with a year earlier, and volumes down by 3% (Nielsen). The performance contrasts with non-cream liqueurs, driven by a new generation of in-home cocktail makers, with sales up 14% in volume and 19% in value.

It is not a research company’s job to try to sex up a market, but when Nielsen – to be fair, probably led by the brewers it was researching – called the burgeoning 1.3%-3.3% abv lager market “commodity” it was so dreary a tag as to make the “standard” lager category sound like a Hollywood A-lister.